How Starlight Hospice Added 5 New Patients in 2 Months with Clipboard

Starlight Services is a home health and hospice provider based in Burbank, California. In operation for over 20 years, Starlight offers home‑based skilled nursing, therapy, and home health aide services, dietitians, wound specialists, medical social worker services, durable medical supplies and incontinence supplies right to the patient’s door. As well as hospice care for patients at the end of life with chaplain services.

Trying To Grow Their Business Without the Clinical Coverage to Match

For Starlight Hospice, care happens at home. Patients are often most comfortable, dignified, and themselves in familiar surroundings, so Starlight focuses on bringing home health aides (HHAs), Licensed Vocational Nurses (LVNs), and Registered Nurses (RNs) directly to them.

Izabella Barrera, Starlight’s HR Director, knows that for patients receiving ongoing, in‑home care, trusting the clinician at their bedside matters most. Matching the right clinician to each case is always the goal, but it’s a complex, daily balancing act. Izabella handles staffing coordination, visit verification, and clinician communication — all while serving a diverse, multilingual patient base.

As Starlight’s patient base grew, cases began coming in from areas farther from their Burbank headquarters such as Orange, Ventura, and San Bernardino counties — well outside of their established clinician networks. Izabella and the Starlight team wanted to bring their care to more people who needed it, but they were dependent on finding qualified clinicians close enough to visit patients in their homes.

When coverage gaps arose, senior clinical staff — including their Director of Nursing — stepped away from their office work and into seeing patients personally. This kept care going, but pulled time and focus away from overseeing patient plans, managing teams, and running day-to-day operations.

Izabella’s team explored staffing platforms, but they all fell short on communication, leaving issues unresolved. Starlight needed a staffing partner that was responsive and consistent, and who could deliver qualified clinicians across a growing service area.

Starlight had worked with Clipboard before, and as their needs evolved, Clipboard’s platform matured alongside them — making it a natural fit for the coverage and support Izabella and her team had been looking for.

More Qualified Clinicians Near More Patients, Staffed From One Platform

Once Clipboard was in place, Starlight’s staffing workflow immediately became easy to manage. Izabella now creates a case directly on the platform by inputting the patient’s name, location, care requirements, and any specific details — everything a clinician needs to decide whether an assignment is the right fit.

For example, if a patient is Spanish-speaking, Izabella flags that directly in the case details, and the platform surfaces clinicians who speak the language. This ensures patients can speak directly with the person caring for them — especially important in such a personal situation.

The platform then offers Izabella a broader pool of qualified professionals near the patient, including HHAs, LVNs, and RNs. She sends the opportunity directly to the closest qualified professional, prioritizing clinicians who already know the patient when possible.

She then follows up by phone — her preferred way to confirm a clinician’s commitment and move quickly. From there, she shares the patient’s info through Clipboard’s built-in chat before looping in Starlight’s Director of Nursing to get care started.

Clipboard’s streamlined staffing process has enabled Starlight to confidently add care for five new patients, expanding timely, high-quality support without increasing overhead or stretching its existing clinicians too thin.

Beyond reach, Clipboard has also delivered something equally important: consistency. By enabling clinicians to choose their own schedules, claim assignments directly, and get paid quickly, the platform gives them the flexibility they want while helping Starlight build a stable bench of professionals who return for ongoing patient assignments.

This means patients see the same familiar faces coming back over and over. For those needing health assistance, that consistency helps build trust and ease some of the hardest days.

An unexpected upside of this model is a built-in path to permanent hiring. When a clinician proves to be a strong fit and takes on enough patients, Izabella can bring them onto payroll without a placement fee — a flexibility she values as the team continues to grow.

The support behind the platform is just as consistent as the clinicians on it. “Clipboard’s team always picks up the phone. And they always follow up with an email documenting what we talked about and what got resolved,” she highlights. They’ve even come by Starlight’s office several times to check in on how things are going, ask what could be better, and share what’s new on the platform.

Izabella knows she has a true partner in improving care and supporting more patients, not just another vendor.

Starlight Expanded Care Across Six Counties with Clipboard

Starlight’s coverage area and patient capacity are no longer limited by the reach of its existing network. Izabella’s office runs leaner, and referrals that were once out of reach are now routine, while senior clinical staff can focus on running operations instead of driving to patient visits.

With Clipboard in place, Starlight can focus on what they do best: bringing compassionate, consistent care to patients at home.

“Clipboard is the reason we can say yes to patients we never could have reached before.”